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20070123 Tuesday January 23, 2007

Intel and Sun Jeffrey asked some questions about what the Intel/Sun agreement means to me, so here are my thoughts.

The short answer is that the agreement with Intel isn't really about supporting 32-bit Intel CPUs, since Solaris has been doing that from the beginning.  It's more about supporting the "white-box" computers that Intel sells.

I have tried using Solaris on my home x86 machines several times over the years, and the driver issues
are usually enough to keep me from making a habit of it.  I don't have the time and patience to
maintain my own OS'es.  Windows is point-and-click enough for me, but Solaris isn't.  I think the
graphics card support is good enough these days, but the wireless networking drivers are still a big hassle.  I'm hoping that the new partnership with Intel will help Sun get more up-to-date drivers. There's several ways that could happen (all 100% speculation on my part):

On another topic, yes, the new Sun IDE is based on the Netbeans platform.  So was the previous version.  But previously we had our own custom version of Netbeans, and now we're using a "stock" version. This is good from the point of view of us not needing to maintain our own special version of Netbeans.  But it's a learning process for us internally because we have to coordinate bug fixes and release schedule with Netbeans.  And in this one area, Netbeans is definately the dog, and the Sun Studio IDE modules are definitely the tail.  (That is: "the dog wags the tail")

Posted by Chris Quenelle ( Jan 23 2007, 11:05:39 AM PST ) - Permalink - Comments [4] -

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mug shot Chris Quenelle is a tools developer at Sun Microsystems. He's worked on performance and debugging tools at Sun for more than 10 years. He reads comic books and science fiction, and has more tivos than he can keep track of.

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